Doðubayazýt Association for Assistance and Solidarity of Families of Prisoners and Convicts (TUHAYD-DER) has released its report on the problems of political women prisoners and convicts in Erzurum E Type Closed Prison.

The report carried interviews with women prisoners. The interviews have been realized through lawyers. According to the report the prisoners didn’t get any result from the petitions to meet with the Public Prosecutor in charge of the women's prison due to the prosecutor’s gender nonconformity with women prisoners. The report says that the Prosecutor doesn’t want to enter the wards of women prisoners.

The interview with prisoner Sükran Gürbüz, who tells that male and female guardians once raided the ward of seven women prisoners and made a search at late night hours due to an anason smell coming out, points out that the prisoners are still exposed to arbitrary practices in the prison. Women prisoners, not given any information about the result of their official complaints against such illegal raids and searches, staged a one-day hunger strike on February 15 to protest the applications against them and therefore debarred from the communication instruments for one month. The report indicated that newspapers are still not delivered to the prisoners despite their objection to the penalty which was executed for the dates between April 11-May 11.

Prisoners, expressing that they also joined the general hunger strike throughout Turkey on February 15, remarked that the heaviest and the most disproportional sanctions in Turkey are imposed in Erzurum prison. Prisoners emphasize that some correction officers consciously display a good behavior and some bad, adding that all these are made to intervene in the political identities of prisoners; to which the public should also be aware towards.

And we didn’t receive any information about the issue from the prison’s administrators whom we couldn’t reach in their position.

Translation: Berna Ozgencil